Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre says Canada’s national security was left exposed after a top scientist at a federal high-safety laboratory collaborated with a Chinese military expert in bioweapons and bioterrorism.
Decrying what he said is a “cover up,” Mr. Poilievre said the documents show there was a massive security beach at the Level-4 laboratory in Winnipeg.
“We have learned that the Trudeau government’s head of pathogens was collaborating with members of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army who are responsible for bioweapons and bioterrorism,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters Feb. 29 in Ottawa.
The Tory leader was reacting to the government’s tabling a day earlier in Parliament of hundreds of pages of documents that address the firing of two scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg in 2021.
Qiu Xiangguo, who was head of the special pathogens unit, and her husband Keding Cheng, a biologist, had their security clearances revoked in 2019 amid a probe on whether they were sharing secrets with China. The two have never been charged and their current whereabouts are unknown.
The NML is Canada’s only biosafety level-4 laboratory which can handle deadly pathogens like Ebola.
“Let me know if you think any of this is hyperbole,” said Mr. Poilievre. “Read the report yourself. This is from government documents. The Trudeau government’s own documents.”
The name of the Chinese military scientist engaged in bioterrorism research is redacted in the documents, and only identified as “Major General, PLA / Top Virologist, AMMS (Chief 2).”
“PLA” stands for People’s Liberation Army and “AMMS” for Academy of Military Medical Sciences.
The major general has been previously identified in the Globe and Mail as Chen Wei, with whom Ms. Qiu collaborated on Ebola research.
Through Ms. Qiu, the NML under the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) had sent Ebola and Henipah virus samples to Wuhan Institute of Virology in March 2019. While those transfers were authorized, the newly released documents say that Ms. Qiu also shipped materials outside the NML without approval.
‘Embarrassment’
Opposition parties had been in a battle to obtain details about what transpired at the lab since details about the events emerged in the press a few years ago.The release of documents was in response to recommendations made by a multi-party committee of MPs and an impartial assessing panel.
Up to then, the government had claimed it a national security prerogative to not disclose the information. It resisted four House of Commons orders and took the former House Speaker to court to avoid releasing the documents.
The committee of four MPs rejected the national security claim after conducting its review.
“The information appears to be mostly about protecting the organization from embarrassment for failures in policy and implementation, not legitimate national security concerns, and its release is essential to hold the Government to account,” the MPs wrote in a Feb. 19 letter addressed to the main parties’ House leaders.
Mr. Poilievre said this shows the government’s intent was not to protect secrets but rather to do a “cover-up” before an election.
“He called a snap election to make sure that the voting would happen before this came out. And what happened in that election? Beijing interfered to help them win it,” he said.
Health Minister Mark Holland, in discussing his tabling of the documents in Parliament Feb. 28, called the lack of adherence to security at the NML “unacceptable.” But he surmised the threat of foreign interference “was in a very different place at that moment in time.”
Mr. Holland also said that “no sensitive information left the lab.”
The Epoch Times asked PHAC and Health Canada if there are ongoing research projects with Chinese entities but didn’t hear back by publication time.
